Segments

On Thursday, President Trump marked the National Day of Prayer with a controversial new executive order intended to advance the political Christian Right’s vision of religious freedom. This week on State of Belief, Interfaith Alliance’s radio show and podcast, we’ll explore the potential impact of the order and find out how people across the spectrum are reacting to it.

Host Rev. Welton Gaddy will be joined by People For the American Way Senior Fellow Peter Montgomery, an expert chronicler of the Religious Right. Conservative evangelicals overwhelmingly voted for President Trump, and many political observers view his latest executive order as payback. Early coverage suggested that the order would roll back LGBT rights, but the final text focused on undermining the Johnson Amendment, which prevents houses of worship from being turned into tools for partisan politics. Peter will help us make sense of the order, its implications and what the Religious Right hopes to achieve with Trump in the Oval Office.

For many of us, pretty much all the news out of Washington, DC has been all doom and gloom lately, but at least the Supreme Court upheld bans on so-called ex-gay therapy, which claims to “cure” LGBT people by turning them straight. Welton will be joined by author, activist and attorney Jay Michaelson for a conversation about this and other recent decisions handed down by the Supreme Court.

Finally, even as Americans seem more at odds with one another than ever, there are efforts underway to bring the nation together. We’ll close the show by interviewing the founder of the One America Movement, Andrew Hanauer, who’s working to beat the odds by uniting people across religious and political lines. You won’t want to miss this activist’s plan to heal a badly divided nation.